You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Every country has the government it deserves.